Bono Meets Hegel

Bono to hazard a guess wants to appropriate inaccessibly Christian values and goals for the further and higher end of bringing people  lots and lots of people into closer concordance with something we could crudely think of being called Christianity in fact’, something more closely resembling a world that wouldn’t make Jesus weep. Bono’s Christian Hegelianism is a lot like the un- or even anti-Christian Hegelianism of secular humanists who want, as Rorty puts it, to "pull up the ladders" from oogedy-boogedy land while retaining the precious earnest of values and commitments that our Judeo-Christian heritage wound up bequeathing us. Those who seek to secularize Christianity aren’t, as Charles Taylor has suggested, merely ’subtracting’ from it; they’re adding to it, even trying to purify’ it of the things within the tradition of Jesus that they think make it imperfect (like Church dogma or even God the Father). Perhaps Bono, in symmetrical contrast, has been on a long quest if I can put it this way to Christianize secularity.

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